Late Antiquity

Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.  The empresses of Constantine (Helena) and Theodosios (Aelia Flaccilla) of the early 4th and late 4th centuries.
Compare the family in the gilt-glass portrait below. 

Late Antiquity and Barbarians

"Barbarians" is believed to come from the Greeks hearing the speech of their non-urban neighbors as mere "bar-bar" prattle; it was the peoples on the northern and eastern fringes of the Hellenistic world who were called barbaroi.  How early Germanic language tribes were in central Europe is uncertain; in his account of the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar speaks of Germani, but that word is actually a Latin adjective implying blood relationship (the Spanish word for "brother", hermano, comes from it), and the tribes on the upper Rhine thus designated in Latin may have spoken a Celtic rather than Germanic tongue.  In any case, the Hellenized world, both Greek and Latin, thought of Celts, Germans, Thracians, Sarmatians, Parthians, to name a few, as radically different from themselves.  When we look at their art, even when it shows the influence of contact with the Hellenized world, we understand why.  In every case, it is an art based on pattern and luxury material rather than on formal theory and humanistic narrative; that is to say, the Gauls themselves never even thought of making a "Dying Gaul" or any other subject based on the heights and depths implicit in being an individual human being.  That is not to say that the non-urban peoples lacked fine feelings and not to suggest that they were incapable of making intellectual and humanistically personal art; after all, given a few centuries, these same populations' descendants produced all of European art and, in the East, the great mosques of Isfahan and Samarkand, not to mention Persian miniatures and the Arabian Nights at the court of Harun al Rashid (786-809).  Study of the world's arts shows that homo sapiens everywhere can, and will, in the space of a few generations, learn to produce whatever art forms he conceives to be desirable.  What their art tells us is that at the time of the Late Roman Empire they had not desired to make art at all like that of the Hellenized ancient world's art.  At this time, too, the "barbarians" are becoming part of the urbanized (civilized) world, and we shall see the fascinating process of new art being born in mixed cultures.

In Late Antiquity, we see Greco-Roman traditions deeply modified in Coptic Egyptian and Sassanian Persian art, but also in great, prosperous cities the curious transformation of pure Greco-Roman art, long before the Early Byzantine (Justinianian) period, into a cooler, drier, more "academic" style, of which fourth-century gilt-glass portraits and ivory diptychs offer excellent examples.  In some of these, it is clear that the artists are losing their intellectual grasp of organic structure (there are related developments at the same time in language and literature).  The fourth and fifth centuries after Christ are pivotal.  It is these centuries that are called "Early Christian" in those countries where the church was already established with authority.  "Early Christian" is not a style; the styles of Late Antiquity are shared in the Greco-Roman world of these two centuries with the art of other religions (until these are put down by Theodosius, emperor 379-395) and with secular art; furthermore, there is already a clear difference between the art of the Greek-speaking world, descending from the art of Greece and Asia Minor from Alexander down to Constantine and less affected by barbarian migrations, and the art of the Latin-speaking world.  The former will become Byzantine art, the latter western Medieval art.

These differences extend even to the shape of the principal building type, the Early Christian basilica, depending on whether the particular building is built to serve the Greek or Latin rite.  Old St. Peter's, St. Paul's Outside the Walls, and Sta. Maria Maggiore, all in Rome, exemplify the type of the Latin rite.

Capital of Roman Empire moved to Constantinople  330
Julian the Apostate, last Pagan emperor, 361-363
Theodosius I, the Great, 379-395
            his sons: Arcadius (east), Honorius (west)
End of western Roman empire, 476 (to Odoacer the Goth)
ALSO:
Sack of Rome by Visigoths, 410
St. Augustine, died 430
St. Ambrose, died 397
St. Patrick, died (?)461
St. Benedict, died 543
Theodoric the Ostrogoth (Dietrich, in German), died 526

            Some of the pieces that will be considered in this section of the course are earlier than Constantine, some later; some are secular art, some sacred, and of the latter not all are Christian, because other religions persisted among persons who patronized arts and some of the peoples north of the Alps had not yet heard of the Mediterranean religions.  But all of the art of late antiquity, in one way or another, shows the traditions that had been inherited from the Hellenistic world slipping into oblivion and/or falling under the impact of outsiders' art.  In this course, we can only touch on this complex and difficult period, but we cannot ignore it without rendering the art of succeeding centuries unintelligible.

[K 305]  By the 4th century A.D. there were eastern (Ostro-) and western (Visi-) Goths all over Europe, and the Celtic peoples (Caesar's Gauls and their cousins) were hard pressed.  Behind the Goths were the central Asian Huns (who, with the Magyars, gave their name to Hungary).  The European regions that were most deeply Romanized are those that speak Romance languages today.  The artistic traditions of the Goths and even the Celts, who had known Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans for so long, were radically different from the traditions of Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilizations, in one way more like the Scythians, because these peoples had not been urban before they came into the urban Greco-Roman world (for they came into Asia Minor, too, and a German tribe, the Heruli, had invaded Athens, Greece, in the 3rd century), and most of their surviving art is jewelry, weapon adornments, and horse trappings.  Consider the Brooch from Szilágy Somlyó in the Hungarian-speaking part of Rumania and the Fibula in the form of an Eagle.  The east European brooch has no figural representation at all; what matters to these people is the beauty of the colored gems and the precious metal setting, the craftsmanship that does honor to the lucky owner, and the design as such.  Although the eagle fibula (a fibula is a safety-pin) is representational, the eagle is maximally abstracted, and the value of the metal, the colors of the gems, and the design as such are what really matter.  Both of these pins are for fastening cloaks and are executed in cloisonné, of the kind called champlevé, in which the dividers that define the cells in which the gems (cut to shape) are placed are not soldered onto a flat piece but are left standing and are part of the backing.  Almost all of the Gaulish and Gothic (German) tribes knew this technique, the latter probably having learned it from the former.  We shall also see cloisonné done with enamel.

[M 188]  Much earlier are the Celtic finds from England that were being made just about the time that Julius Caesar invaded England and through the Julio-Claudian dynasty.  These represent the last Celtic art from England that is not stylistically mixed with the art of the ruling Romans (called Romano-Celtic) and, after the 5th century, with the art of Germanic Angles and Saxons and that of Mediterranean missionary monks.  Archaeologists call the Celtic styles of Europe that follow the Hallstatt (the Vix Krater was in the tomb of a Hallstatt Celtic princess or priestess) "La Tène".  This art is technically superb and elegantly curvilinear but, like the Germanic pins, it abhors representing things as we see them.  La Tène designs were originally inspired by the floral patterns on imported Greek and Etruscan pottery and metalwork, but the Celtic artists relentlessly abstract from them the pure curves and recurves in never-ending movement that are the essence of their art.  Thus the Celtic art, although fundamentally different from Germanic art, is just as radically unnaturalistic, just as devoted to colors and materials and craftsmanship.  The famous examples that we have here, the Desborough Mirror and the Battersea Shield, are both on view in the British Museum.

[K 173]  The gilt glass portraits (most are portrait miniatures) of the 3rd and 4th centuries, however, come from the very heart of the Greco-Roman world and were made for members of the upper classes.  Whenever the persons are named, the writing is in Greek, but we don't know exactly where in the wide Greek-speaking world they were made.  The flecks of gold leaf and black paint (sometimes with other colors) are applied on the back of the glass, which is mounted in metal, so that the easily damaged image is protected.  Thus, they remind us of miniatures in lockets or of silver-on-copper daguerréotypes, which had to be covered with glass and framed similarly.  Like the ivory diptychs (they are contemporary with the earlier ones), the gilt glass portraits show us the faces of the leisured and cultured classes of Late Antiquity holding onto their values and the remnants of a lifestyle for dear life, as we feel, also, reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy or the poetry of Ausonius or the anonymous masterpiece, Pervigilium Veneris.  The Bouneri and Kerami medallion is exactly at the watershed between "Late Roman" and "Byzantine" style.  It shows how much of the understanding of drapery folds (even in the heavy brocaded fabrics now worn by those who can afford them) and of the structure of the face (the shadows that create the relief of the noses represented frontally are perfectly understood and rendered), for example, will survive intact in Byzantine art, while the feeling of the portrait images, with their frontality and intense, staring non-expressions, is distinctly post-Constantinian.  There is no way of telling what religion these people believed; the style is pervasive in their socio-economic class.

[K 223]  Weaving is something else: multi-colored flat weaves, such as twills, with silk or wool weft on a cotton or linen warp, necessarily simplify and schematize flowers and figures.  Prized patterned textiles were made and exported in Late Antiquity not only from Sasanian Persia (the most beautiful, silks, which made their way west, as well as east to China via the Silk Routes and were widely imitated) but from Egypt ("Coptic" because the town, Coptos, near Luxor was a trading center of the Christian Egyptians in the pre-Islamic centuries).  Coptic Textiles have a wide variety of motifs, mostly from ancient mythology but some Christian, in a style more remote from the ideals of classical tradition than the weaving technique as such demands.

[O 416]  The Sasanian Persians (whose religion was Zoroastrian) ruled a great empire, bridging from the Greco-Roman world to the Indo-Chinese world (226 until the Arab Conquest in 640, whereupon the last Sasanian king fled east and died a refugee in China at the Tang court).  Pervasive western ignorance of the history of the pre-Islamic Iranian middle east is abysmal and as much responsible as anything else for our diplomatic difficulties in this part of the world.  Ardashir I took Ctesiphon, their capital, from the Parthians (remember the recovery of the Standards from the Parthians on the breastplate of the Primaporta Augustus) in A.D. 226.  Shapur I (242-272) built the magnificent new palace at Ctesiphon, with its imposing hairpin-shaped brick vaults over the  audience hall.  Here we see the Sasanian architect handling superimposed orders in his own way, using "blind" arcades in a manner appropriate to brick.  We saw long ago that the absence of stone quarries in southern Iraq and Iran made the successive peoples who inherited the traditions going back all the way to the Protoliterate Sumerians the world's innovators in construction and design in brick.  Early Byzantine builders, as in Hagia Sophia, learned not only from Roman but also from Persian brick, while Islamic architecture in brick, after the Arab conquests, is, of course, the direct descendant of this tradition.

[O 418]  Near Persepolis, where earlier we studied the Achaemenid palace begun by Darius the Great in 521 B.C., are the cliffs at Naqsh-i-Rustam, in which the tombs of the Achaemenid kings, including Darius, are cut out of the living rock.  Below the ancient tombs, on the face of the cliff, are the reliefs of Sasanian kings, the same sort of thing, you could say, as the reliefs on the Arch of Titus 180 years earlier, but from the other side's point of view.  It is because of this relief, showing the triumph of Shapur I in A.D. 260, that, when we studied the portrait of Gallienus, I mentioned that he was the son of Valerian; Valerian is the Roman emperor shown kneeling before the magnificently mounted Shapur I.  These also are the enemies from whom the Romans learned of the slatted armor we saw on the Porphyry Tetrarchs and the use of large army horses capable of carrying the extra weight of horse armor.  Learned the hard way: in 260 A.D. Valerian's army was destroyed by Shapur's, and there were barbarians in Greece (Heruli), Asia Minor, and northern Italy (note that I do not call the urban, literate Sasanians "barbarians"), which his son Gallienus could not hope to cope with.  On the other hand, the Naqsh-i-Rustam relief is eloquent witness to the long, continuous contacts between the Persian and the Greco-Roman world: Valerian kneels in 3/4 view, with pleated drapery--but wears Persian trousers; both Shapur and Valerian, although not in motion, have flying capes (that go back to examples such as the Stele of Dexileos of 394 B.C.) but with very oddly stylized folds.  Once again, it is a case of artists' using something not created and developed in their own tradition, but here they make something out of it more original than at Palmyra.

[O 424]  The Sasanians are most famous for the patterned silks from the royal looms and for their metalwork, both of which were exported and prized far and wide, influencing these mediums in both Byzantine art and Chinese art, affecting even early medieval metalwork in western Europe.  Our example, the Silver Plate of Khusraw II Hunting, is late Sasanian, so contemporary with the Early Byzantine empire rather than the western Romans; in fact, Justinian's general, the great Belisarius, had to fight his father Khusraw I; this time Belisarius was the victor, and we see a Renaissance idea of the battle by Piero della Francesca in the True Cross Cycle of frescoes at Arezzo (Khusraw, Khosru, and Chosroes are variant spellings of the same name, the last being what the Greek sources call him).  From the point of view of 15th century Italy, Chosroes is just one more "infidel" for the Cross to conquer.  As comparison with the Silver Missorium of Theodosius I, [K 216], below, suggests (and many other examples could be compared), between the 3rd and 6th centuries there was a great deal of artistic cross-fertilization between middle eastern and Mediterranean metalworkers.  Note that the iconography is the Royal Hunt, with exactly the same meaning as in the Assyrian lion hunts at Nimrud and Nineveh.

Now we turn to the Christian art of the Late Antique Greco-Roman world, from Constantine to Justinian.  This is imperial Christian art, no longer the art of one of the minority religions, but it antedates the end of the Empire in the west, and it also antedates the Age of Justinian, when the term Early Byzantine becomes truly appropriate for the Christian art of the Greek-speaking world.

[MG 52] [MG 53] [MG 54]  The Old Basilica Church of St. Peter is not significantly later than the completion of the Basilica Nova, though it dates from the second half of Constantine's reign.  In its structure and its basic design, unlike the Basilica Nova, it is a typical traditional basilica with a flat timber roof and regular colonnades separating the nave (central space) from the aisles and a regular clerestory wall, as we saw at Pompeii and in the Basilica Julia in the Forum Romanum (also Trajan's Basilica Ulpia), rising above the aisles for high windows to light the nave.  On the other hand, it is a religious building, so it has the orientation of a temple, with the entrance aligned with the apse at the opposite end.  Most Roman temples after Augustus had apses.  In the Roman temple, the statue stood in the apse; in the Christian church, the altar (often raised on steps, a bema) stood in front of the apse, which framed it.  The Roman temple was placed at the end of a colonnaded forum (as we saw already at Pompeii); the Christian basilica has a colonnaded courtyard in front of it, which now assumes the name atrium that three centuries earlier had named a room in a Roman house.  Constantine's architect used the basilica form for a church, because Christianity is a congregational religion, whereas people used Roman and Greek temples singly or casually, a few at a time; a basilica is par excellence the building type capable of holding many people, and, because in the early centuries of the church, only the baptized could be present at the Holy Communion, Christians could not hold their rites in the open, as the ancient Greeks had done (except in the Eleusinian Mysteries).  The catechumens (those being instructed, not yet baptized) could congregate in the atrium.  Old St. Peter's has one feature that will be widely influential in the future, a feature that other Early Christian basilicas do not have, so when we see it later we know where it comes from: the transept.  As the Latin name implies, it cuts across between the nave and the apse, and it is high-roofed like the nave, and thus is just as apparent on the exterior as when you are inside.  It makes the plan T-shaped.  At this date the cross of the crucifixion is a T (tau), and it is hard to doubt that the transept, the one radical innovation here at the invention of the Christian church plan, was devised to make the church building like the cross in which it is grounded.  St. Peter's tomb (traditionally, and archaeology suggests probably in fact) was below where the bema of his basilica was sited, and tradition holds that Peter himself was crucified.  Old St. Peter's stood until the present "basilica" by Bramante, Michelangelo, and others, was built in the 16th and 17th centuries.  Our knowledge of the old basilica is based on excavation and on numerous drawings of it made shortly before it was torn down.  These show the timber roof open, without a coffered ceiling.

[MG 56] [MB 36] [K 6]  Santa Maria Maggiore, built a century later, is practically as large as Old St. Peter's was, but it has no transept.  Since its coffered ceiling is early modern, it may have had an open timber roof, too.  Its inlaid floor pavement is recent, but it is probably similar in kind to the original one.  The architectural canopy over the altar, also, is late.  The unfluted Ionic columns (like the Corinthian ones in Old St. Peter's and those in other 5th-century and later churches in Rome) were taken from some Roman civic building, and only basilicas and forums had so many identical columns to offer.  It is called "Maggiore" because Rome, of course, has several churches dedicated to Mary, and this is the larger, greater (maggiore) one.  In the long view we see that the wall framing the apse is decorated with mosaics (so was the half dome of the apse, but those are lost); the drawing of Old St. Peter's shows that it had mosaics in the same places, and there are other examples.  In the context of church architectural decoration, this mosaic on the wall framing the arch of the apse is called the triumphal arch, another term that acquires a new application in Christian art.  The mosaics on the triumphal arch, [MB 36], center on Mary's rôle in the Incarnation (the Latin word for [the Word] made flesh).  Above, she is enthroned for the Annunciation; below the Three Magi/Kings offer their gifts to the enthroned Christ Child (on a purple cushion), with Mary seated in a minor throne, with a footstool (a royal attribute), beside him.  The haloes also, originally belonging to Sol, the sun god, are worn by some emperors on the coins of the 3rd century.  Remembering the catacomb paintings, we can't help noticing how Imperial Christianity has become, now that it is the official religion; the intention is in part reverent, to transfer to Christ everything the divinzed emperor had claimed, and in part assertive, to claim the right of the church to be what Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol had been.  Now the Bishop of Rome is Pontifex Maximus of the State, too.  Like most 5th-century art made in Rome, the style of the mosaics (glass tesserae, because it is a wall mosaic) is more naturalistic than mosaics of similar date made for churches by Greek artists.  There are even stratified clouds similar to the marble-carved ones in the Endymion relief.  Notice the Magi/Kings; a magus is a Zoroastrian astrologer, and that is why they are shown dressed in the artist's idea of Persian clothes, with lots and lots of jewels.  The rectangular mosaics, [K 6], above the entablature of the columns and below the clerestory, on the wall of the nave, told the essential stories of the Old Testament on one side, the Life of Christ on the other.  One of the finest among them is the Parting of Lot and Abraham.  It has often been very truly observed that these are still utterly Roman in style (the royal symbolism studied on the "triumphal arch" not being required here).  Of course, glass mosaic precludes detail, but the drapery is fundamentally logical and convincing and so is the modelling in light and shade and color; the backgrounds are abbreviated but no more so than much earlier Roman art.  The eloquent gestures and the visible rift opened down the center between Lot and Abraham are typical of the story-telling power of Roman public art.  The skills that made art effective for state propaganda still work for getting across the point of a Bible story.  Notice how much more competent this style is than that of the narrow frieze on the Arch of Constantine; development in the history of art is almost never just steady improvement or steady decline.

[K 3]  The Standing Good Shepherd in the Vatican Museum, as well as the Seated Young Christ, Teaching in the Vatican, also continue Roman style of the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, only with Christian subject matter.  Until the 6th century, in the West, Christ is regularly young and beardless, often resembling a young Orpheus or a young Apollo (whose images had been among the prototypes for those of the new state religion).  As in the Lot and Abraham mosaic, the figures are somewhat short and large headed, but also beautiful and, although the running drill is much in evidence, it is used adroitly and does not look like just so many random slots.  The most important point is that the overall feeling of these images is idealized but not august, not severe, not royal.

[K 144]  The perfect example of the style we have just seen in the round is the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, who was the urban prefect of Rome (≈ mayor) and died in A.D. 359, so this is the dated sarcophagus of a well documented person.  The Seated Young Christ, in particular, closely resembles the Christ enthroned in the center of the upper register on the Sarcophagus, which was found in the grottoes under St. Peter's.  Now, why is the University Print labelled "Greco-Roman-Asiatic"?  The sarcophagus is of the type, with niches formed by little columns, that since the 2nd century was usually made in western Asia Minor (other types were made in Athens and Italy).  Besides, the almost lacy architectural details, done with the drill, are usually seen, full size, in Greece and Asia Minor (for example, in the architectural members of the real palace of the emperor Galerius excavated in Thessaloniki in northern Greece).  Once again, therefore, the stereotype of "typically Roman", "purely Western" is challenged.  Moral: humanity has a hard time outgrowing unscientific separatisms.  Was the sculptor of this Roman prefect's sarcophagus from Asia Minor?  Where, then, was the sculptor of the Seated Young Christ trained?  For that matter, whom did Constantine (who ruled, mostly, from Constantinople), or his agents, choose to work for him in Rome?  We don't know, but 4th and 5th century art from Italy is, on the whole, different from that of Greek cities.
The Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus gives us a fine repertory of standard compositions for Biblical subjects in the middle of the 4th century: The Sacrifice of Isaac, Christ Arrested, Christ between Peter and Paul, Christ brought before Pilate, Christ washing his disciples' feet, Adam and Eve, Palm Sunday (with Zacchaeus up in the tree), Daniel in the Lions' Den, Christ being led away.

[G 127] [G 128] [B 18]  The Church of Santa Costanza was built ca. 330 as the Mausoleum of Constantia, Constantine's daughter.  We already have remarked that round temples were built for special reasons, but more to the point here is that, all the way back to Etruscan tombs (round) and the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos (nearly square) and the Imperial Mausolea of Augustus and Hadrian (round) and Diocletian's Mausoleum at Split (octagonal), mausolea are central-planned buildings, and Santa Costanza, notwithstanding the low colonnade that once surrounded it, is one such.  You will have noticed the round structures beside the transept of Old St. Peter's with "jelly bean"-shaped porches like Santa Costanza's; they are Early Medieval in date and may have been inspired by Santa Costanza, but they are baptistries.  In fact, Christian baptistries, where one dies to the old Adam and is reborn new and washed of original sin, resemble mausolea.  Apart from being central-planned, Santa Costanza relates to a basilica-shaped church much as a Greek or Roman round temple relates to a rectangular one: it has a tall central space lit by a clerestory, but round; its central space is separated from the aisle by a colonnade, but the aisle is annular (ring-shaped).  At a glance you will discern why practical churches are seldom central-planned: where do you put the bema and altar?  Today Santa Costanza is a church, and a popular one, but especially popular for baptisms and small weddings.  One of the prettiest things about it is the paired columns topped by sections of architrave.  The reconstruction drawing, [G 127], indicates that the walls and dome were once covered with glass mosaic; today only some of those in the annular vault (a curving barrel vault) of the aisle and in the semi-domes of the two round niches remain.  The Vintage Mosaic with putti (babies) doing human tasks, picking and trampling the grapes, has a long past history in Roman art.  On the Good Shepherd Sarcophagus of the late 3rd century we saw vines as symbols of resurrection and eternal life (not confined to Christianity alone), and that is the meaning of the vintage here.  The overall growth of the vine patterns is remarkably free and nature-like (notice the birds).  The bust of a woman in the center may be intended as Constantia herself.

[K 4] The self-same symbolism in a not dissimilar style but rendered in carved relief is seen in the porphyry Sarcophagus of Constantia now in the Vatican Museums, once in her mausoleum.  The trampling of the grapes by putti is on the ends and putti inhabiting vine scrolls and picking grapes on the wide sides; here the scrolls are more formally arranged.  If proof were needed, this sarcophagus shows that the odd style of the Porphyry Tetrarchs in the corner of San Marco, Venice, is not due to the hardness of the stone or the date, for the sarcophagus is carved with such great skill that you'd think it was easy, and it is a long generation later than the tetrarchs.

[K 220]  Discussing the gilt-glass miniatures, we mentioned the popularity of ivory diptychs in the same period.  A diptych is any two-fold (-ptych- is the Greek word element for "fold") picture or writing tablets, like book covers without pages but coated with dark wax on the inside; writing with a stylus, the pale ivory shows through where the stylus displaces wax.  Diplomats and officials and their friends sent letters in them, tying them closed and securing them with sealing wax.  They would be exchanged as gifts on the occasion of appointments to positions (there were still annual consuls in Rome, though their duties were minimal) or of marriages between families, as seems to have been the occasion for the Diptych of the Nicomachi and the Symmachi, one half of which we see here, the other leaf being in the Musée de Cluny in Paris.  These were Roman families of senatorial rank (both families, nota bene, with Greek rather than Latin names!) at the end of the 4th century.  Such families seem to have been keenly aware of the evanescence of civilization as they had known it and strove to maintain it (above we mentioned the philosopher Boethius, who lived just a century later).  Here they have sought out an artist devoted to the ideals of classical beauty and refinement; if he could, he would recreate the style of Augustan cameos, or the Portland Vase.  He could not.  He had the technique, and he had the desire, but he no longer grasped the relationship between loveliness and structure, between the separate figures and objects and their relation to each other within a consistent spatial reference, between the motions of the organic body and the response of the cloth to that body and to gravity, that are the essence of classical art.  Notice the beauty, though, of the acanthus frame and of the idyllic stock tree, and of the delicacy of carving in all the details.  On the other hand, notice that, no matter how hard we try, we can't figure out whether she is supposed to standing on her left leg (the one nearer us) or her right, and where her little acolyte behind the altar may be standing is anyone's guess.

[K 221]  The ivory panel with the Maries at the Tomb and the Ascension of Christ, on the other hand, is one of a group of wonderful ivories made around 400 that are thought to have come from workshops in northern Italy, perhaps in Milan (ancient Mediolanum).  These are wonderful because, although their subject matter is Christian and the figure proportions are short-bodied and large-headed, so much of what was vital in classical art is alive in them.  Instead of imitating something Augustan or Hadrianic, these artists to a remarkable degree still understand the underlying principles that gave the old styles their emotional power and sense of rightness.  Take the figure of Christ, with the feet firmly set, with the drapery pulled tight, grasping God the Father's outstretched hand so you know he won't let go.  Take the mournful figures sobbing and leaning on the tomb.  Take the lovely figure of a wingless angel at lower left, looking like the young philosopher, Christ in the Temple-type, teaching-gesture Christ, whose speaking gesture tells the Maries that he is not here but risen.  And these figures are only about three inches high.  Of course, the story and the message are all-important, and the built tomb (a Roman tomb, such as well-to-do families built; the artist was unfamiliar with the sort of rock-cut tomb that Jesus was actually buried in) is very small compared with the human figures, but that sacrifice had already been made in the historical reliefs on the Column of Trajan.

[K 302]  The diptych of Stilicho (as Consul) and of his wife Serena and their son combines the striving for beauty and refined carving of the Symmachi-Nicomachi diptych and the real understanding of form of the Three Maries/Ascension ivory with something else: the court style of the emperor Theodosius the Great (compare the next two works).  And who was Stilicho?  He was a Roman general (Theodosius's chief general, as Belisarius would be Justinian's) and a great statesman, with Theodosius's niece as his wife, and on Theodosius's death he was guardian to Honorius, the heir to the throne of the western Empire (who in 408 had him wrongly killed, Stilicho remaining noble to the end), but by birth he was a Vandal, a German, whose ancestors a century earlier had been settled in what is now Rumania.  So much for ethnic labels (from the ravagings in the next century by Vandal tribesmen we get the word "vandalism").  With the diptych on the occasion of his consulship before us, we see that he knew and cared, too, about the quality of artists.  The low relief figure of Stilicho, all in proportion, is perfectly related to the drapery, and the figure of the little boy is all grace.  Serena, though, is a bit weak in the midsection.

[K 216]  The silver Missorium (disk) with the Emperor Theodosius and his sons Arcadius and Honorius (heirs, respectively, to the eastern and western halves of the Empire) is of the same date.  The emperor in the center is framed by the arcuated lintel of a temple pediment; in the intercolumniations left and right are his sons; Arcadius, the elder, is the larger figure at left.  Outside the temple-façade that frames these rulers by divine right (that is the idea, now that Christianity precludes their being divinized in person) are their armed bodyguard.  This is Constantinopolitan imperial iconography, out of which Byzantine imperial imagery will develop.  Like Stilicho's, their figures are tall and slender, and although attenuated (not solid looking) to the point of suggesting disincarnation and frontal (because iconic), are perfectly related to their courtly draperies.  The logic of drapery is preserved.

[K 197]  You may remember that one of the centers from which the emperor Hadrian ordered sculpture for his Villa at Tivoli was Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, so will be less surprised to see the most wonderful full-sized portrait statues of the early 5th century coming from Aphrodisias.  The Statue of an Official suggests what a full-length three-dimensional marble statue of Stilicho might look like, if we had one.  Even though the man is represented wearing a loose-draped toga over his sleeved garment, we still have the strongest sense of the bulk, weight, continuity, and potential for movement of his body inside it, and none of the lines of folds or edges of falling cloth are used decoratively but are functional.  Also, the man is a real, individual person.  These Aphrodisias statues are the last of their kind for a very long time; we shall next see his like in the Gothic period statue of St Theodore, [K 76], at Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1220.

[K 215]  In Istanbul you can still see the outlines of the great Hippodrome, now an open green area, with the obelisk that Theodosius I (emperor 379-395) had brought from Egypt (because there was one in the Circus Maximus in Rome).  The Base of the Obelisk of Theodosius is the prime example of what we mean by Theodosian style; it is as if the silver Missorium, or the diptych of Stilicho, were to be translated into stone relief (the blue-gray marble of western Asia Minor).  The workmanship (we can see this even though the surface is much worn having been exposed all these centuries) is very fine and exact, especially in comparison with the narrow frieze on the Arch of Constantine, but we can no longer speak of a "failure" of naturalism or rendering of space.  Here indeed we have art that eschews those goals; its goals are divine dignity and gracious power expressed in formal frontality.  Here is a new art born from an old but with its own agenda.  It is the very precision and logic of the carving that emphasizes the avoidance of any illusionism or anecdotal sentiment.

[MG 168] [MG 170] [1611]  Galla Placidia's Mausoleum at Ravenna is the earliest of the imperial monuments that we shall study there (see MAP 3, south of Venice).  She was Theodosius's daughter, Honorius's sister; recent reference books put her death ca. 450.  Her life history would make an unbelievable epic movie, with her exerting great influence in the last reel when her son Valentinian III was made emperor.  Her mausoleum also is central-planned but in the shape of cross with short, equal arms.  Beside the powerful forms of San Vitale, built a century later, it looks like nothing in particular (but then, on the outside, the Pantheon in Rome looks like just a big cylinder).  Inside!  Almost all the colored marble veneer, the inlaid marble floor, even the alabaster window panes (these may be replacements, but early) are preserved.  Above, all is glass mosaic.  The vaults are dark blue with patterned stars fit to remind you that heaven is for the vision of God, they are so lovely.  One of the mosaics at the end of an arm of the cross shows the deacon saint, Lawrence, whose martyrdom was to be roasted alive on a gridiron, which is shown ready; he has a cross over his shoulder to indicate his following Christ even to martyrdom, but only Late Medieval art would think of physically representing the roasting; here it is the meaning, not the feeling, that matters.  The mosaic of Christ the Good Shepherd is different both from the emblematic representations that we saw in the catacombs and from later images of this idea.  Christ is still shown beardless, and he is in a natural, twisting three-quarter view pose (how different from the reliefs on the base of Theodosius's obelisk!), and the six sheep are not lined up like symbols but disposed as naturally as mosaic will allow in a Mediterranean traditional rocky, sagebrushy landscape, in front of a pale blue, graduated sky (even the Lot and Abraham in Sta. Maria Maggiore in Rome at about the same date, for all their naturalism, have a gold background); these sheep are not only woolly and modelled in light and shade and seem really to be standing and lying down but two of them are even foreshortened.  Not that this is like an American landscape of, say, Yosemite in the 19th century.  It is conventional landscape, but the convention that it follows is that in which naturalness rather than emblematic formality is used.  As with the St. Lawrence, it is the meaning that matters; this style expresses the real humanity of Christ and the real creaturely relationship between him and his "sheep", his flock; it says that caring is part of and within nature.  Yet the artist, dressing Christ in gold, with a purple cloak visible over his shoulder and across his lap, with a golden halo, leaves no doubt that this mosaic represents the risen Christ caring for humankind; a golden cross means that the cross of pain has become the cross of glory.  I describe this at length, because when a work of art is ancient and the name of the artist is lost we tend to overlook how much meaning there is in stylistic choices.  The people for whom this art was made were not so image-saturated and overstimulated as we are.

[K 5]  A hint as to where naturalistic conventions were preserved, and continued, survives in one of the oldest complete illustrated books that we possess, The Vatican Vergil.  This is a codex (plural, codices), that is, a book with pages bound between covers, rather than a rotulus, a scroll; both types were still used.  As you recall, Vergil wrote the Aeneid for Augustus, but he also wrote Eclogues, which are bucolic shepherd poems (not about realistic shepherds, but about Arcadian life as a return to untarnished, uncomplicated simplicity), and Georgics, which are poems on how to run a farm!  Thus he did for Latin what Homer, Theocritos, and Hesiod had done for Greek.  It is the Georgics that this picture illustrates, and it exemplifies perfectly what is meant by conventional landscape, naturalistic in intent: the illustrator did not look at real nature to do it; he had learned how to do it in his apprenticeship; but he had learned how to make a few plants and buildings give the feeling of nature.  Similarly, by this time, we have reams of Latin poetry that gives the most delicious feeling of nature written, in many cases, without so much as opening a window.  Eventually, of course, it will lose its roots and dry up (cf. [MD 35], Adam and Eve at Hildesheim, A.D. 1015).

[K 211]  Very obviously, the Mosaics around the Dome of the Rotunda of St. George in Thessaloniki although also of the first half of the fifth century (now dated ca. 410) are altogether different.  We are back in the world of the Silver Missorium of Theodosius, but now in a religious mosaic rather than courtly metalwork.  On the Missorium it is Theodosius and his sons that are framed by wholly symbolical architecture; here it is the saints (Onesiphoros and Porphyrios are only two of them) and in the center of the dome that they surround was the bust of Christ borne aloft by angels (very little of this survives).  The unreal architectural forms both on the Missorium and here should remind you of the Antonine Market Gate of Miletus and even of the upper wall in the Ixion Room of the House of the Vetii at Pompeii: they all derive from the design of stage buildings in the theaters of the Roman Empire.  In these mosaics this illogical, disembodied architecture is finally given very specific meaning: rendered in gold and on a gold background (which is infinite light instead of a mundane sky) it is the City of God (which just in these years Augustine was contrasting to the World in which the Church Militant operates).  Logically constructed architecture, no matter how rich, could never convey this idea; it would look merely like the Palace at Constantinople or Domitian's in Rome or even Galerius's Palace here in Thessaloniki (the Rotunda, before it became a church and these mosaics were done, was the mausoleum of the pagan emperor Galerius, one of the Tetrarchs under Diocletian, who built a palace and a triumphal arch here, and his mausoleum as Diocletian did at Split; that is why St. George's is round).  The tall, beautiful saints stand before the City of God, each and every one of them with his arms raised in prayer (like the orantes in the catacombs); they pray in worship and they pray for the church of believers.  You may notice that they look like priests celebrating Mass; that is because church vestments go back to court garments of this period.  You may find some book that says that gold is used to make the picture flat.  No.  Gold is used for glorious light.  The tall figures of the saints are the equivalent in mosaic of the tall official by a sculptor of the school of Aphrodisias, of nearly the same date.  It is out of this Theodosian and post-Theodosian art of Greece and western Asia Minor that Early Byzantine art will come.

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